


From the Dusk to Dawn

by orphan_account



Category: Game Grumps, markiplier - Fandom
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Romance, slow progression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 18:47:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3260504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	From the Dusk to Dawn

“Hey, Mark?”

Tom’s voice distracted him from the game he was playing—Earthbound for the billionth time and still going strong with it. He looked away from the screen to meet his brother’s dark eyes. Part of him wanted to feel irritated for the interruption, when all he wanted to do was play his game. Yet there was a nervousness in the older boy’s gaze that Mark had so rarely seen that any snappy remarks died before they reached his lips.

“Yeah, what’s up?” All of his attention was dragged away from his game. It wasn’t like he wasn’t ever going to play (and replay) Earthbound ever again, and his brother looked like he really needed Mark’s help. “Something wrong?”

“No, not really?” Tom replied, the lilt in his voice making it come off more like a question than an answer. He fidgeted, fingers playing idly with the edge of his shirt.

Mark wasn’t convinced. A worried line creased between his eyebrows as he frowned. This wasn’t like his brother to act like this at all. “Well, then what’s going on?”

“What do you think of Marissa?”

“Excuse me?” That definitely wasn’t anything like Mark was expecting Tom to say. With the way that Tom stood in the doorway of their room, restless shifting his weight from one foot to the other and looking like he might bolt at the slightest startle, he would have thought that his brother had gotten into some deep trouble. Like stealing, or breaking a priceless object, or getting into drugs, or something like that.

Not just that Tom had a question about some girl.

“Marissa,” he clarified, misunderstanding Mark’s confusion. “You know… brunette, curly hair, those cute glasses with the butterflies on them…” Tome explained, rattling off a quick description of the girl in question.

Truth be told, Mark didn’t actually have an inkling of who his brother was going on a boat. ‘Marissa’ was just a name of some faceless girl. There were tons of curly-haired brunettes, and Mark couldn’t say that he was too familiar with many of Tom’s friends anyway. For all he knew, Tom could have just been making up some girl as a setup to whatever convoluted prank that required Mark to believe in this ‘Marissa’.

The glasses with the butterflies, however, actually did ring a bell. It came to him in a rush—the girl who was over maybe once a week or so, all smiles and giggles along with Tom as they worked together on homework. Once she had called Mark cute. Of course, it was in a “oh, you’re Tom’s little brother, how cute!” sort of way, but it stoked up Mark’s ego nonetheless.

His answer came easy. “Oh yeah, her! I don’t know, she’s pretty cool I guess. I like her,” he said with a nod and a shrug. Just about as cool as any of Tom’s other friends that came around to their house.

As the words left his mouth, Tom visibly relaxed, shoulders slumped forward and hands dropped away from his shirt, but it only lasted a moment before he straightened back up. “Glad to hear that, because I’ve sort of got this favor to ask.”

Suspicion immediately clouded over Mark’s expression. The openness with which he’d turned his attention to Tom snapped shut. “What’s that?” he asked, more guarded now.

“It’s nothing big!” Tom assured him. He stepped inside, out of the doorway, kicking the door closed behind him. “I just… well I sort of asked Marissa out, and she said yes, so I want to take her to this sort of restaurant-bar-cafe thing that Alex told me about. They had like these live performances by littler bands and they food is apparently the best.”

Alex was one of Tom’s good friends, coming over to their house almost every day. The teenager knew about all the little hole-in-a-wall places with the best food and guaranteed to have the best dining experiences. So it didn’t surprise Mark that Tom might want to take a girl to one of those recommended places for a date.

He just didn’t know what it had to do with him, however.

“Yeah… so?” he prompted, impatient for Tom to get to the point.

“Well it’s sort of like out of town… and you know how mom will get if I take a girl out of town, alone,” he continued. He had begun to fidget again, wringing his hands as he spoke. “She’d freak out.”

Now that was a lie, and both Tom and Mark knew it. “No she won’t. She’d probably actually be thrilled.” Their mother wasn’t shy about things like dating and sex and the like. Mark highly doubted that she’d be upset, even if she thought that her sons were getting it on with someone.

“Ok, no she won’t,” Tom relented, scratching the back of his neck. “But she’ll ask all kinds of questions and act all knowing and stuff. I just don’t want to deal with that.”

That made sense. Their mom’s prying could get a bit irritating at times. He couldn’t blame Tom for wanting to avoid that. But it still didn’t tell him what Tom needed a favor from Mark for.

Thus far, Mark had managed not to feel irate with his brother, but he was quickly losing his patience by now. Earthbound was tugging at the corners of his fraying attention, and his lips turned into an irritated little frown. “What’s your point?”

“Could you come with us? Mom won’t ask so many questions if you’re there with us.”

And there it was. Mark raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t opposed to the idea at all, especially not if the date was to an Alex-approved location. The fact that he’d technically be a third-wheel didn’t bother him too much, either. It just surprised him that Tom would want his twelve-year-old brother tagging along on his date.

“But hey, he’d take it.

“I’ll go if you pay for me,” he said with a broad grin.

Relief smoothed out Tom’s expression. As if he’d seriously expected Mark to pass up the opportunity for free delicious food and entertainment. Silly.

“Dude, thanks so much. I’ll tell mom that we’re going out on Saturday!” Now that he had Mark’s agreement, excitement laced his words. Tom spun on his heel, practically ripping the door off its hinges as he opened it. Then he was gone, heavy footfalls echoing off the walls as he bolted through the house, supposedly to their mom’s room, or wherever she was the moment.

Still grinning, Mark finally turned back to Earthbound, but his mind was no longer so much on the game. Saturday was going to be sweet.

\----------------------------------------------

“Woah.”

That was the only way Mark could describe the place. True to Alex standards, it the place turned out to be very hole-in-the-wall-esque. Although there weren’t very many people inside, it somehow still felt cramped and closed in. As they threaded their way around tables to one closer to the stage, Mark wondered at the feeling that they were in a very enclosed space. In actuality, it was fairly large, big enough for plenty of people to fit inside on its busiest days.

“I kind of like it,” Marissa said, smoothing a hand over her thick braid as she looked around. Her voice was soft, almost drowned out by the music playing quietly over the speakers, but she was close enough to Mark and Tom that it wasn’t hard to hear her. “It’s got that charming little homely feel.”

It definitely felt little. Mark didn’t know if he agreed with all the other adjectives Marissa decided to use. Rather, it seemed a bit run-down.

But if Tom’s friend had recommended it, Mark was willing to give it a chance.

He was glad that he did, too. They sat, chatting idly about various things—Marissa asked him a couple question about how school was going and what he thought about junior high—but eventually Marissa and Tom broke off in their own conversation that had Mark feeling left out of it.

Poking at the meal he’d gotten—chicken strips, because he wasn’t feeling too adventurous—Mark allowed his attention to wander. The music had stopped, and it looked as if a band was going to come on. Tom’s and Marissa’s voices washed over him, but he didn’t have any clue what they were saying, watching the stage instead as whatever band it was set up. He must have missed the introduction if there had been one, and he didn’t recognize them.

Nor was he surprised that he had no idea who they were. Appearance-wise, they looked like one of those teenager bands that he’d seen in movies before, practicing in their mom’s garage and bothering all the neighbors with the cacophony they produced. Not to mention that the lead singer looked stoned out of his mind. Hadn’t Tom said that this place featured little-known up-and-coming bands?

This one looked like it was already falling apart.

Then they actually began playing. Mark raised his eyebrows, surprised. He didn’t really know many music terms, but the sound tugged at his heart. And then the lead singer actually began to sing. It was a raspy sound, but regardless sent chills down his spine and little tingles right to his extremities.

He wouldn’t mind listening to that curly-haired man sing for an eternity.

It was over much too quickly. Mark hadn’t even gotten halfway through his meal, though he might have been paying more attention to the stage than to his food. He watched as the band made their way off the stage, and couldn’t help but marvel at the lankiness of the lead singer. The man looked as if he had too many extra miles in limbs and didn’t really know what to do with them all, or perhaps he was just too out of his mind on drugs to really care about it.

“Hey, what was that band called?” Mark spoke up, tearing his eyes away from him.

His question apparently caught Tom and his date in the middle of the conversation. Two sets of eyes turned to look at him, Tom’s vaguely irritated at the interruption and Marissa’s more curious than anything.

“The one that just played?” Marissa asked for clarification, already pulling the small pamphlet from the middle of the table closer to her.

Mark nodded. “They sounded pretty good.” Maybe he’d look them up later on when they got back to Cincinnati.

“Hm, let’s see.” She was silent for a couple of moments as she scanned the information on the pages.

Tom locked eyes with Mark as she tried to find the answer for the younger boy, obviously not happy with him butting in with his questions. Mark shrugged. It was his brother who’d asked him to come along on the date anyway. Tom could deal with one or two questions about musicians.

“The Northern Hues, I think,” Marissa announced finally, smiling triumphantly as she looked back up at the two boys.

“Weird name,” Tom commented, picking a french fry off of Mark’s plate and popping it into his mouth.

Definitely weird, Mark silently agreed with him. But surely it’d be easy to remember them to look them up later, so maybe that was the point of the name in the first place.

He was silent again for the rest of the date, making a face when Tom gave a swift peck to Marissa’s cheek, then gagged when she pressed a soft kiss in return to Tom’s lips. Neither of them noticed Mark’s quiet disapproval of their public displays of affection. They returned back to their own city, and Tom dropped Marissa out at her house before he and Mark went back home. All joking aside, it was nice to feel the bubbly happiness radiating off of Tom as they made their way back home, and remained that way well into the night as they nodded off to bed.

Mark completely forgot to look up The Northern Hues, and days later when he was humming along to the tune of one of their songs, he was frustrated to find that he had no clue where the song stuck in his head had even come from.


End file.
